Alright folks! It’s week 3 of the Jeffrey Court Renovation Challenge. AND you can start voting this week!!!! Hubby and I are elbow deep in drywall dust, caulk and thin set but not in that specific order. Am I tired? A little. Am I having fun? Uh hard yes says me and hubby is still on the fence but guess what, we can’t turn back now! The hard part is done. Everything is ripped out and ready to rebuild. Now the fun can really begin!

To refresh you all here is the plan for the newly gutted space.

We chose the Riverfall Basalt Mosaic Tile for the shower and the Statuary Heaxagon Path Tile for the flooring. We chose gold and flat black accents along with some wood tones to neutralize it all. That sounded pretty professional didn’t it!! But first before we can actually start installing everything we ran into a few minor issues.

As with every home project we do, there always seems to be a roadblock here and there. Do the renovation gods just love to make our lives a little more challenging or what. Like, oh hey that was too easy, let’s add some dry rot to your floor to make you work harder. They don’t call it sweat equity for nothin’ folks.

Our first one came after we took the old drywall off. You can see here that there was some rotting on the wood near the floor.

We found out where it was coming from (an exhaust pipe going to the roof) and fixed that culprit and then replaced the wood.

The next issue was a pipe protruding from the old tub that will be in the way of the new tub seen here.

Resolution to this issue is to reroute it so that it doesn’t protrude into the new tub.

Those were really our major issues. Other than having to replace all of the insulation since it was exposed to 40 years of moisture. If there were a smell button to insert here I would make it smell like a musty damp dark basment from 1920. Yep, thats what that smelled like. You’re welcome. Take in a deep breath.

If you recall when we removed the shower tile in the last post, it was installed over plain old drywall and therefore over time the grout broke down and moisture got behind it seeping into the drywall and therefore the insulation. Another lesson in installing tile is to get everything moisture proof that’s under the tile and make sure it’s installed correctly. We will be using Schluter Kerdi board as our underlayment for the tile to be installed on top of. (I’ll have more of what this is in the next post)

Other than those few issues we are running pretty smoothly and on schedule to install. The tub is going in today, then the Kerdi-board and then tiling begins! Once that all starts it won’t be long friends.

Next week I’ll be sharing some of my install day and a few sneak peaks as we move right along! That’s it for this week. Over and out!